Description

This report is focused on agricultural robots and drones. It analyses how robotic market and technology developments will change the business of agriculture, enabling ultra-precision farming and helping address key global challenges.

It develops a detailed roadmap of how robotic technology will enter into different aspects of agriculture, how it will change the way farming is done and transform its value chain, how it becomes the future of agrochemicals business and how it will modify the way we design agricultural machinery.

Application assessment: Detailed application assessment covering dairy farms, fresh fruit harvesting, organic farming, crop protection, data mapping, seeding, nurseries, and so on. For each application/sector, a detailed overview of the existing industry is given, the needs for and the challenges facing the robotic technology are analysed, the addressable market size is estimated by territory, and granular ten-year market projections are given.

Company profiles: More than 20 interview-based full company profiles with detailed SWOT analysis, 40 company profiles without SWOT analysis, and the works of more than 76 companies/research groups listed and summarized. Robotics in dairy farms will reach $8bn by 2023 Robotic and drones have already started to quietly transform many aspects of agriculture. Already, thousands of robotic milking parlours have been installed worldwide, creating a $1.9bn industry that is projected to grow to $8bn by 2023. Mobile robots are also already penetrating dairy farms, helping automate tasks such as feed pushing or manure cleaning.

Tractors become increasingly autonomous

Tractor guidance and autosteer technologies are also going mainstream thanks to improvements and cost reductions in RTK GPS technology. Indeed, more than 300k tractors equipped with autosteer or tractor guidance will be sold in 2016, rising to more than 660k units per year by 2026. Unmanned autonomous tractors have also been technologically demonstrated with large-scale market introduction largely delayed not by technical issues but by regulation, high sensor costs and the lack of farmers' trust. This will all change by 2022 when sales of unmanned or master-slave (e.g., follow me) tractors picks up.

Drones bring in increased data analytics into farming

Agriculture will be a major market for drones, reaching $480m in 2026. Unmanned remote-controlled helicopters have already been spraying rice fields in Japan since early 1990s. Indeed, this is a maturing technology/sector with overall sales in Japan having plateaued. This market will benefit from a new injection of life as suppliers diversify into new territories and as low-cost light-weight sprayer drones enter the market. The progress of drones is by no means limited to spraying. Their core function is to provide detailed aerial maps of farms, enabling farmers to take data-driven site-specific action. These light-weight low-cost drones are often loaded with small multi-spectral sensors, measuring key indicators about plant health, yields, water stress levels, nitrogen deficiency and so on. This development will soon be entering into its growth years.

This is because regulatory barriers for drone deployment are coming down and, more importantly, precision farming ecosystems is finally coming together meaning that farmers can act on what the data tells them. In time, the drone hardware will become commoditized and value will shift largely to data acquisition and analytics providers.

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